PERSON: David Lynch (Deceased)

David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 15, 2025) was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. Often described as a visionary and acclaimed for films distinguished by their surrealist and experimental qualities, Lynch is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. In a career spanning more than five decades, he received numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and an Academy Honorary Award in 2019.

Lynch studied painting and made short films before making his first feature, the independent body horror film Eraserhead (1977), which found success as a midnight movie. He earned critical acclaim and nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director for the biographical drama The Elephant Man (1980) and the neo-noir mystery art films Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001). For his romantic crime drama Wild at Heart (1990), he received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He also directed the space opera Dune (1984), the neo-noir horror Lost Highway (1997), the road movie The Straight Story (1999), and the experimental psychological thriller Inland Empire (2006).

Lynch also worked as a musician, releasing solo and collaborative albums, and as a furniture designer, cartoonist, animator, photographer, sculptor, and author. A practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, he founded the David Lynch Foundation to fund meditation lessons for at-risk populations. A lifelong smoker, he died from complications of emphysema after being evacuated from his home due to the January 2025 Southern California wildfires.

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